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The Biden-era State Department promoted censorship in Brazil, according to documents highlighted by former State Department official and free speech advocate Mike Benz.

The State Department’s “Integrated Country Strategy” for Brazil warned about “disinformation during elections and on social media” and promised to “support Brazil’s democratic institutions by providing training, capacity building, and engagement.” Benz wrote via X on Sunday that this 2022-era document served as “Yet another smoking gun” revealing the “deliberate” and “top-down” construction of Brazil’s censorship apparatus by the Biden-era State Department. The strategy explicitly singled out "disinformation on social media" as something it would ‘capacity-build’ to stop.”

MRC Free Speech America found a great deal of such capacity building in publicly available grant data. It revealed the State Department allocated $371,661.04 for initiatives aimed at fighting “misinformation,” “disinformation,” as well as promoting “media literacy” in Brazil. This funding was awarded by the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia and various consulates across Brazil.  

Brazil has aggressively pursued censorship, fining tech mogul Elon Musk, threatening X employees and seizing funds from X and SpaceX. The South American country has gone to great lengths to pressure Musk into censoring content.

Brazil also forced Rumble to shut down its operations in the country for refusing to censor. Both Rumble and Truth Social (the social media platform owned by President Donald Trump) have sued over demands that they censor Allan dos Santos, a Brazilian national in the U.S., whom the Brazilian government wants to prosecute. In addition to fighting for social media censorship, Brazil recently convicted a man for telling supposedly “bigoted” jokes.

The State Department’s support for Brazilian censorship is far from an isolated incident. MRC  covered 57 examples of censorship initiatives involving at least 90 Biden-led agencies. Many of these initiatives included the involvement of the State Department and U.S. embassies globally, covering Montenegro, Belgium, Guinea, North Macedonia, Sri Lanka, the Czech Republic, Germany, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Uganda and the Netherlands. 

Read More: [The Biden Administration Waged War on Free Speech with 57 Censorship Initiatives]

Additionally, both Brazil and the United States have funded the Pancopop Project, which produced a video attacking populists and promoting social media censorship and authoritarianism during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Former National Science Foundation Director Sethuraman Panchanathan, infamous for his censorship ties, oversaw the spending of taxpayer funds on the Pancopop Project. He was involved in three other censorship initiatives—listed as #5, #14, and #17 in MRC’s report—-, including efforts to weaponize AI against so-called misinformation and disinformation for the Biden administration. He resigned in April 2025.

Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.